However, I did give the key defining property that holds in all cases whenever a numeric value is used as a symbol, namely that the value of the symbol cannot be determined from inspection of the symbol alone. Consequently the fact that the symbol is numeric has no numeric significance and only serves to make it distinct.

Let me try to extend that second paragraph of the definition a bit to accommodate the missing case:

If a symbol is represented by a string which contains numeric octets but chooses not to employ any collating sequence information to given the string numeric meaning, or if a symbol is represented by a string which contains non-numeric octets and it is not possible to directly decode this string into a single native numeric value without involving additional information, or if the symbol employs any other representation from which the value of the symbol is not determinable by decoding the bits in the representation, then the symbol CANNOT BE a numeric reference because it has no built-in predefined value. Such a symbol can only be assigned a value by symbol resolution, a process which can assign to it ANY value whatsoever, because the bits in the symbol representation do not intrinsically encode that value.

More of a mouthful, but more accurate and complete. Thanks. :-)

Pity that the Oracle team doesn't give a damn about accuracy and completeness.

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